Category Archives: public engagement

Liz Alexander in an Oct. 20, 2016 article for Fast Company describes a ‘futures’ game designed by Toronto, Canada-based Idea Couture,

Other than a brief chat with a college career counselor, or that time a family member asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, has anyone encouraged you to look into the future? Were you ever formally taught how to develop your capacity for foresight? Me neither.

A new game called IMPACT, by the innovation and design firm Idea Couture, wants to change that. Given how rapidly the workforce is evolving—not to mention life’s inherent uncertainty—IMPACT’s creators felt it might be useful to help people sharpen their ability to anticipate and respond to unexpected change, especially when it comes to their careers.

It’s designed for groups of three to five players (though up to six can play), and it’s arguably best suited to people ages 16 and older.

To begin, each player chooses a card that outlines their persona for the duration of the game. All are meant to represent a knowledge worker from the future workforce—someone who helps customize prescriptions for patients; uses social-media mining and systems thinking to assemble distributed teams; or develops living spaces, transportation solutions, and health innovations to make space travel more feasible for humans. And each persona card includes a set of optimal conditions for exercising their skill sets.

In each round, a player draws an “impact card” describing a technological breakthrough that may shake up their career prospects—for good or ill. Every player then has to react to its impact by adding or subtracting “influence cubes” to the game board, which covers 10 “domains” (agriculture, energy, transportation, etc.), only three of which are relevant to each character’s “preferred future.”

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As Elaine Cameron, resident futurist and senior director of the FUTURE Perspective Group at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteler, explains, “One of the things futurists learn to be comfortable with is a degree of uncertainty. What we are equipped to do is to track signals of change, anticipate the direction of travel, and imagine possible scenarios that could evolve”—all skills that IMPACT is meant to sharpen in players. “That way you have some kind of plan in place should any of those possibilities become reality.”

I [Liz Alexander] recently asked some volunteers to give IMPACT a spin. One was Debra France, a corporate educator at a global innovation company. In one round, France was faced with four cards describing real-life technological breakthroughs in green jet fuel, cheap spray-on solar cells, fuel-producing plants, and biomedical implants that can bond with human cells. While only some of these eco-friendly innovations worked to her persona’s strengths, and she won bonus round at the end of the game by coming up with the “era” headline: “It’s now easy being green.”

Afterward, France said she had a strong sense of the game’s real-world applications, including “for young people in STEM programs,” because it pushes players to consider “a broad range of possible future jobs that could help them decide which science or technology to pursue.”

If you have the time, it’s an interesting article.

Here’s a video Idea Couture produced touting their game,

Were you just as surprised to find out the Government of Canada has an innovation lab (Policy Horizons Canada)?

Here’s a little more about the government’s innovation lab from a Sept. 19, 2016 Idea Couture news release announcing their IMPACT Kickstarter campaign (closed on Oct. 1, 2016) on PRWeb (Note: A link has been removed),

The game was originally designed in collaboration with Policy Horizons Canada, an innovation lab within the Government of Canada, whose work explores how disruptive technologies may shape the economy and society. Players learn about developments in fields like nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, biotechnology, and robotics; and are prompted to consider their industry, environment, and policy implications.

IMPACT is currently used by public servants within the Government of Canada to introduce and teach the discipline of strategic foresight. Now, through the launch of a Kickstarter campaign, Idea Couture is on a mission to make it available to anyone who wants to get better at futures thinking.

Robert Bolton, Head of Foresight Studio at Idea Couture, says, “When people play IMPACT, they practice the creative and critical thinking skills that foresight strategists like us use in our work with Fortune 500 companies and governments. We want to make those skills broadly accessible, so a more diverse population of citizens is empowered to participate in determining the shape of the future.”

I’m glad to see this game as it seems designed to raise awareness about science and future applications. It’s especially good to see the Canadian government and its policy makers using these tools. However, after watching the video, it seems that this game is not for everybody. You may have noticed the players are aged 20 – 40 (at the most). What about those of us who don’t fit into the demographics (employed 20 – 40 year olds) as shown in the video? Plus, I have a strong suspicion that this game is oriented to urbanites in the Canadian south.

If the game is intended to have a broader appeal than what is seen in the video, Idea Couture needs to do a better job of telling the story.

I last wrote about ‘Woolly Thoughts” some years ago in a July 28, 2010 posting which focused on science knitting. Now, Alex Bellos has written an Oct. 3, 2016 posting for the Guardian about the ‘mathekniticians’ behind ‘Woolly Thoughts’,

In 1996 two British maths teachers active on an internet knitting forum were asked by a US yarn firm to design it an afghan.

“We were sent into a panic! We had no idea what an afghan was!” remembers Pat Ashforth, who with partner Steve Plummer is known in the crafts community for maths-inspired knits.

The couple soon discovered that an afghan was a knitted or crocheted blanket or throw. They produced four designs for the US firm, and it began a journey that has defined the rest of their lives.

Ashforth and Plummer decided that the afghan was the perfect canvas for expressing mathematical ideas – and since then they have devoted much of their time to producing as many as they can.

Together they have knitted and crocheted about 90 mathematical afghans (math-ghans?). Since each afghan takes about 100 hours to complete, this means the total time spent they have spent making them is about 9,000 hours (which adds up to 375 days – more than a year). And they have also made many other mathematical objects in wool.

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The couple met while teaching at a school in Luton. By 1999 they were both working at a school in Nelson, Lancashire, where they married in 2005. Originally the afghans were hung in their classrooms. “They were invaluable as a vehicle for talking about maths, says Ashforth. “Large, touchable, unbreakable items were perfect for encouraging group discussion. It is much easier for everyone to be looking at the same thing than for each individual to have their own separate book.”

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Not only are the images in the afghans mathematical, but the way they are made also involves mathematical thinking.

“We enjoy the challenge of seeing an idea then working out how it can be made into an afghan in a way that would be easy enough for anyone else to recreate. It is like trying to solve a puzzle and refining it to give the best possible solution.”

This is a great story from Bellos and it’s studded with images of the couple’s work.

Here are a few examples you won’t find embedded in Bellos’ posting,

Vincent: This illusion is based on Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat. The portrait was painted in 1887 and is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The colours in the illusion were chosen to reflect the impression of the painting but they are very subtle. If I was making it again I would choose slightly more contrasting colours for better definition of the face. Courtesy: Woolly Thoughts

QR Code: You have probably arrived at this page because you scanned the wall-hanging, or a photo of it, elsewhere. I have been thinking about knitting a large-scale QR code for several years. I wanted it to look as little like a QR code as possible, which is rather perverse as the whole purpose of a code is that people can instantly recognise it and scan it with a phone. Some of my ideas were very complicated and I could not be sure that they would work. Eventually I decided to try a simple version first. There may be others later. QR codes differentiate between light and dark so the actual colours don’t really matter. My first attempt, which I pulled undone, had many more colours than the final version. I thought it looked very messy so eventually settled for four dark, and four light, colours, on the principle of the ‘four-colour map theorem’. There is no pattern for this design. Courtesy: Woolly Thoughts

Mixed Mitrefours: All of the shapes are kites and are all exactly the same size. Four-sided shapes that are all the same will always fit together. This design is unusual because the kites are constructed in two different ways. You may see some 3D effects in the design. It seems to look different from each direction. Courtesy: Woolly Thoughts

Harris is a skilled interviewer who had done some research and the approximately 22 min. interview is spritely with Dickenson offering a good introduction to the field. The radio excerpt also features a few phone-in questions from listeners.

As for ‘Nanogirl’Dickenson is an engineer who lectures at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and is associated with the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

I wonder how many ‘nanogirls’ there are around the world? In a July 13, 2010 posting, I posted about an American writer known as nanogirl and her 3D graphic novel featuring nanotechnology.

Zoom into Nano which is at Vancouver’s Science World from Sept. 24, 2016 – Jan. 2, 2017 has spawned a number of events for the month of October:

October 5 – Nerd Nite; Very Small Things – 7-10pm

October 13 – KPU Lecture – What Can Artists and Filmmakers Teach Us About Scientific Visualization?

TBA – Café Scientifique – Tipping The (Nano) Scale – 6-8pm

The Nerd Nite event was fully booked but on the off chance there might be a reprise, here are a few details from the Nerd Nite Event page,

Nerd Nite is going on a field trip once again! October is going to be a big month with our regular night still at the Fox Cabaret on Oct.26th, but Oct. 5th we’re giving you a second chance to nerd out, this time at Science World! To celebrate the opening of the new exhibit “Zoom into Nano”, we’ll have three talks on different perspectives on nano technology, but best of all, IT’S FREE.

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#1 Invisibly Small Items: Hand-Turned Nano-scale Art

Maarten Meerman

Bio: Maarten is a rocket scientist and space engineer by day, designing satellites, space missions, and rocket trajectories, and editing space textbooks. He is a member of the Greater Vancouver Woodturners Guild, and he has published articles about innovative woodworking and nanoturning: his work has been covered on CTV News and CBC radio, and in the Surrey Now, Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver Sun newspapers. He is a regular exhibitor at the annual Positively Petite art show in Coquitlam, BC, and he is in demand to demonstrate and teach microminiature skills on his nanolathe in the US and Canada.

#2 Reaching the Nearby Stars

Kat Kelly

Carl Sagan once said ‘It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses’. This talk will explain how we in fact will be that species by sending nano robotic spacecrafts to our nearest star system to take pictures and send them back to Earth.

Bio: Kat is a Physics and Astronomy student at The Open University and full time Science facilitator at Science World.

#3 Medically Minute

Sarah Simon

A medical lab inside a pill? Cancer sensing nanowires? Arrays of injection needles too small to feel? All of this and more could become part of a routine doctor’s visit through advancements in nanotechnology and nanomedicine. This talk will give an overview of the current state of nanomedicine from a nanoscientist’s perspective.

Bio: Sarah Simon is a masters graduate of Chemistry at UBC, specializing in dye-sensitized solar cells. She currently works as a science facilitator at Science World, BC.

The KPU lecture ‘What Can Artists and Filmmakers Teach Us About Scientific Visualization?’ in the KPU (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) & Science World Speaker Series is free and here’s more from its Science World event page,

The relationship between creative experimentation, artistic representation, and the world of science has always been close, and perhaps no closer than in the past few decades. With the aid of digital advancements in motion picture and computer modelling, the artists and filmmakers of today continue to guide and influence mainstream and even modern scientific perceptions about what the future of invention and ingenuity will quite literally “look” like. This talk will examine what artists and filmmakers can teach us about scientific visualization long before a scientific hypothesis or paradigm can be tested and made material, arguing how the world of visual art positions artists as powerful conceptualizers in bridging scientific discovery to the rest world.

I thought the show was well put together and engaging. Probably my favourite moment was ‘walking into the heart of a crystal’ although ‘stretching molecules’ also rated pretty high. Also, measuring your height nanometers is a stellar idea.

The show dealt with the problem of describing nanotechnology by avoiding the usual tropes such as describing a billionth of a metre as 1/100,000 of a hair and, instead, concentrating atoms.

Don’t expect to come out of the experience being able to describe nanotechnology. The reason why is that the show successfully demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of the field with ever attempting a cohesive, coherent description. Nonetheless, you can learn from this exhibit (I picked up a few new bits of information and I’ve been researching this stuff for 10 years).

The show’s origin in New York (state) is quite apparent in some of the exhibit descriptions. Sadly, there was no attempt to localize the exhibit, which seems like a missed opportunity since there’s some interesting work being done here in Canada. But, perhaps the events will help fill that void.

One other mild nit, some of the exhibits were not functioning when I visited. Unfortunately they were the first ones I tried to play with. Thankfully, there were plenty of others that worked just fine.

Overall, it’s an engaging, mildly educational show for casual visitors.

Free passes

I have two adult passes and two children’s passes (it’s a package set, which is good until Jan. 12, 2017) that I will give to the first person who correctly answers this question by Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016 4 pm PDT:

Who coined the term ‘nanotechnology’?

You can email me at: nano@frogheart.ca

Good luck!

ETA Oct. 19, 2016: Sorry for the delay but here’s the answer: Norio Taniguchi, professor at Tokyo University of Science coined the term, nanotechnology in 1974.

WHIZ! POW! BAM! BOOM! Today [Oct. 5, 2016], the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) announce the opening of the second annual Generation Nano: Small Science, Superheroes! competition. The contest invites U.S. high school and home-schooled students to create a superhero that uses nanotechnology — science and technology on the scale of a nanometer, or one billionth of a meter — to solve crimes and meet today’s challenges.

By challenging students to think big (or small, in this case) to create superheroes with nanotechnology-inspired gear or powers, NSF and NNI aim to promote an early interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“An increasing number of students are drawn to the fascinating field of nanotechnology, which allows us to do things not possible before in computing, mobile communication, medicine and the environment,” said NSF Senior Advisor for Science and Engineering Mihail Roco. “The younger generation will carry on future progress in this exciting field. The Generation Nano competition gives students an opportunity to creatively combine this scientific interest with their artistic side.”

An Oct. 5, 2016 NSF news release, which originated the news item, describes the first competition and provides information for students wanting to enter this second one,

Last year’s first-ever Generation Nano competition inspired entries from more than 115 students across the U.S. The winning superhero creations included Nanoman, who battled a malignant crab-monster named Cancer; Radio Blitz, who helped dispose of local waste; and Nine, a rising superhero who used his nanosuit to defeat a pair of kidnappers.

“The number and quality of the submissions to the Generation Nano contest last year were fantastic,” said Lisa Friedersdorf, deputy director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, which provides public outreach for NNI. “I’m very excited by the four key societal missions identified for this year’s contest as nanotechnology can play a critical role in addressing each of these needs. I can’t wait to see the creative and imaginative ways the student teams take on this challenge!”

This year, participants’ superhero creations must tackle one of the following societal issues:

Justice — Using nanotechnology to fight criminals, bullies, supervillains and other wrongdoers.

Relief — Using nanotechnology to aid victims of famine, drought and other disasters.

Health — Using nanotechnology to heal the sick and injured.

Environment — Using nanotechnology to generate clean energy, control pollution and create a sustainable future.

NSF will promote the opening of the competition this week at New York Comic Con, the East Coast’s largest popular culture convention. A panel will bring together NSF-funded scientists and storytellers to talk about their imagined worlds.

Student contestants are encouraged to submit their superhero creations to the Generation Nano competition website for an opportunity to compete for prizes. A panel will review the submissions and select 15 semifinalists, and then a first and second place winner. Submissions from all semifinalists will also be posted to the Generation Nano website to allow the public to vote for their favorite superhero, which will receive a People’s Choice award.

Additional competition details

U.S. high school and home-schooled students should submit a written entry explaining how their superhero uses nanotechnology to do good, along with a two-to-three-page comic and 90-second video.

Three rounds of judging will take place, with winners announced in the spring.

Prizes: $1,500 for first place; $1,000 for second place; and $750 for the People’s Choice award.

Visit the Generation Nano competition website for full eligibility criteria, entry guidelines, timeline and prize information. For additional questions about the contest, contact the Generation Nano team at gennano@nsf.gov.

As noted in the news release, the competition opened Oct. 5, 2016 and entries can be submitted until Jan. 31, 2017 and you need to submit a written piece, a 2-3 page comic, and a short video.

There’s a series of Slate.com articles, under their Future Tense: The Citizen’s Guide to the Future and Futurography programmes, which are the result of a joint partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University (ASU). For the month of Sept. 2016, the topic was nanotechnology.

But also my eyes glaze over whenever someone starts to talk about graphene or nanotubes. What is nanotech, exactly? And should I care?

In the broadest sense, nanotech refers to the deliberate manipulation of matter on an atomic scale. That means it’s arguably as old as our understanding of atoms themselves. To listen to nanoevangelists, the technology could radically transform our experience of material culture, allowing us to assemble anything and everything—food, clothing, and so on—from raw atomic building blocks. That’s a bit fantastical, of course, but even skeptics would admit that nanotech has enabled some cool advances.

Actual conversations around the technology have been building since at least the late 1950s, when famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a seminal talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he laid out the promise of submolecular engineering. In that presentation—and a 1984 follow-up of the same name—Feynman argued that working at the nanoscale would give us tremendous freedom. If we could manipulate atoms properly, he suggested, we could theoretically “write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin.”

In that sense, Feynman was literally talking about available space, but what really makes nanotechnology promising is that atomic material sometimes behaves differently at that infinitesimal scale. At that point, quantum effects and other properties start to come into play, allowing us to employ individual atoms in unusual ways. For example, silver particles have antibacterial qualities, allowing them to be employed in washing machines and other appliances. Much of the real practice of nanotech today is focused on exploring these properties, and it’s had a very real impact in all sorts of material science endeavors. The most exciting stuff is still ahead: Engineers believe that single-atom-thick sheets of carbon—the graphene stuff you didn’t want to talk about—might have applications in everything from water purification to electronics fabrication.

You say this stuff is small. How small, exactly?

So small! As the National Nanotechnology Initiative explains, “In the International System of Units, the prefix ‘nano’ means one-billionth, or 10-9; therefore one nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.” To put that into perspective, the NNI notes that a human hair follicle can reach a thickness of 100,000 nanometers. To work at this scale is to work far, far beyond the capacities of the naked eye—and well outside those of conventional microscopes.

Can we even see these things, then?

As it happens, we can, thanks in large part to the development of scanning tunneling microscopes, which allow researchers to create images with resolutions of less than a nanometer. Significantly, these machines can also allow their users to manipulate atoms, which famously enabled the IBM-affiliated physicists Don Eigler and Erhard K. Schweizer to write his company’s logo with 35 individual xenon atoms in 1989.

What I do know about nanotech is that it involves something called gray goo. Gross.

Gray goo is the nanorobot-takeover scenario of the nanotech world. Here’s the gist: Feynman proposed that we could build an ever-smaller series of telepresence tools. The idea is that you make a small, remotely controlled machine that then allows you to make an even smaller machine, and so on until you get all the way down to the nanoscale. By the time you’re at that level, you have machines that are literally moving atoms around and assembling them into other tiny robots.

Feynman treated this as little more than an exciting thought experiment, but others—most notably, perhaps, engineer K. Eric Drexler—took it quite seriously. In his 1986 book Engines of Creation, Drexler proposed that we might be able to do more than build machines capable of manipulating atomic material—autonomous and self-replicating machines that could do all of this work without human intervention. But Drexler also warned that poorly controlled atomic replicators could lead to what he called the “gray goo problem,” in which those tiny machines start to re-create everything in their own image, eradicating all organic life in their path.

Drexler, in other words, helped spark both enthusiasm about the promise of nanotech and popular panic about its risks. Both are probably outsized, relative to the scale at which we’re really working here.

It’s been, like, 30 years since Drexler wrote that book. Do we actually have tiny self-replicating machines yet?

No.

Will we?

Probably not anytime soon, no. And maybe never: In a 2001 Scientific American article, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Richard E. Smalley articulated something he named the “fat fingers problem”: It would be impracticably difficult to create a machine capable of manipulating individual atoms, since the hypothetical robot would need multiple limbs in order to do its work. The systems controlling those limbs would be larger still, till you get to the point where working at the nanoscale is impractical. Winking back at Feynman, Smalley quipped, “there’s not that much room.”

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It’s a pretty good overview although there are some curious omissions. Unfortunately, Brogan never does reveal his interview subject’s name. Also, I’m surprised the interviewee left out Norio Taniguchi, a Japanese engineer who in 1974 coined the term ‘nanotechnology’ and Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, the IBM scientists in Switzerland who invented the scanning tunneling microscope which made Eigler’s and Schweizer’s achievement possible. As for Richard Feynman and his ‘seminal’ 1959 lecture, that is up for debate according to cultural anthropologist Chris Toumey. From a 2009 Nature Nanotechnology editorial (Nature Nanotechnology4, 781 [2009] doi:10.1038/nnano.2009.356) Note: Links have been removed,

Chris Toumey has probably done more than anyone to analyse the true impact of ‘Plenty of room’ on the development of nanotechnology by revealing, among other things, that it was only cited seven times in the first two decades after it was first published in the Caltech magazine Engineering and Science in 1960 (ref. 5). However, as nanotechnology emerged as a major area of research following the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1981, and culminating in the famous IBM paper of 1991, “it needed an authoritative account of its origin,” writes Toumey on page 783. “Pointing back to Feynman’s lecture would give nanotechnology an early date of birth and it would connect nanotechnology to the genius, the personality and the eloquence of Richard P. Feynman.”

Brogan has also produced a ‘cheat-sheet’ in a Sept. 6, 2016 article (A Cheat-Sheet Guide to Nanotechnology) for Slate. It’s a bit problematic. Apparently the only key players worth mentioning are from the US (Angela Belcher, K. Eric Drexler, Don Eigler, Michelle Y. Simmons, Richard Smalley, and Lloyd Whitman. Even using the US as one’s only base for key players, quite a few people have been left out (Chad Mirkin, Mildred Dresselhaus, Mihail [Mike] Rocco, Robert Langer, Omid Farokhzad, John Rogers, and many other US and US-based researchers).

The glossary (or lingo as it’s termed in the article) is also problematic (from the cheat-sheet),

Carbon nanotubes: These extremely strong structures made from sheets of rolled graphene have been used in everything from bicycle components to industrial epoxies.

Unless you happen to know what graphene is, the definition isn’t that helpful. Basically, the cheat-sheet provides an introduction including some pop culture references but you will need to dig deeper if you want to have a reasonable grasp of the terminology and of the field.

Nanomedicine

James Pitt’s Sept. 15, 2016 article, Nanoparticles vs. Cancer, takes some unexpected turns (it’s not all about nanomedicine), Note: Links have been removed,

Nanoparticles’ size makes them particularly useful against foes such as cancer. Unlike normal blood vessels that branch smoothly and flow in the same direction, blood vessels in tumors are a disorderly mess. And just as grime builds up in bad plumbing, nanoparticles, it seems, can be designed to build up in these problem growths.

This quirk of tumors has led to a bewildering number of nanotech-related schemes to kill cancer. The classic approach involves stapling drugs to nanoparticles that ensure delivery to tumors but not to healthy parts of the body. A wilder method involves things like using a special kind of nanoparticle that absorbs infrared light. Shine a laser through the skin on the build-up, and the particles will heat up to fry the tumor from the inside out.

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Take nanotubes, tiny superstrong cylinders. Remember using lasers to cook tumors? That involves nanotubes. Researchers also want to use nanotubes to regrow broken bones and connect brains with computers. Although they hold a lot of promise, certain kinds of long carbon nanotubes are the same size and shape as asbestos. Both are fibers thin enough to pierce deep inside the lungs but too long for the immune system to engulf and destroy. Mouse experiments have already suggested that inhaling these nanotubes causes the same harmful effects (such as a particularly deadly form of cancer) as the toxic mineral once widely used in building insulation.

Shorter nanotubes, however, don’t seem to be dangerous. Nanoparticles can be built in all sorts of different ways, and it’s difficult to predict which ones will go bad. Imagine if houses with three bathrooms gave everyone in them lung disease, while houses with two or four bathrooms were safe. It gets to the central difficulty of these nanoscale creations—the unforeseen dangers that could be the difference between biomiracle and bioterror.

Up to this point, Pitt has been, more or less, on topic but then there’s this,

Enter machine learning, that big shiny promise to solve all of our complicated problems. The field holds a lot of potential when it comes to handling questions where there are many possible right answers. Scientists often take inspiration from nature—evolution, ant swarms, even our own brains—to teach machines the rules for making predictions and producing outcomes without explicitly giving them step-by-step programming. Given the right inputs and guidelines, machines can be as good or even better than we are at recognizing and acting on patterns and can do so even faster and on a larger scale than humans alone are capable of pulling off.

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Here’s how it works. You put different kinds of nanoparticles in with cells and run dozens of experiments changing up variables such as particle lengths, materials, electrical properties, and so on. This gives you a training set.

Then you let your machine-learning algorithm loose to learn from the training set. After a few minutes of computation, it builds a model of what mattered. From there comes the nerve-wracking part; you give the machine a test set—data similar to but separate from your training set—and see how it does.

Pitt has put something interesting together but I think it’s a bit choppy.

Nano and artists

Emily Tamkin in a Sept. 20, 2016 article talks with artist Kate Nichols about her experiences with nanotechnology (Note: Links have been removed),

Kate Nichols is doing something very new—and very old.

The former painter’s apprentice is the first artist-in-residence at the Alivisatos Lab, a nanoscience laboratory at UC [University of California]–Berkeley. She’s made art out of silver nanoparticles, compared Victorian mirror-making technology with today’s nanotechnology, and has grown cellulose from bacteria. Her newest project explores mimesis, or lifelike replication, in both 15th-century paintings and synthetic biology. That work may seem dazzlingly high-tech, but she says it’s in keeping with the most ancient of artistic traditions: creating something new by making materials out of the world around.

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How did you move from that [being a painter’s apprentice] to using nanomaterials in your art?

It was sort of an organic process that began years before I started working with these materials. It was inspired by two things. One was, I’ve always been intrigued by artists who made their own materials. Going back to early cave painters—the practice of making art didn’t begin with making images, but with selecting and modifying and refining the materials to make art with. When I was studying these Renaissance-era methods of making paint—practicing with these methods, making my own paints in my studio—I began thinking that in many ways, it was sort of like a historical re-enactment. I was using these methods that were developed by these people back in the 1400s. As a person who’s interested in this tradition of painting, what does it mean to be building on that tradition in the 2000s? So I was thinking, well, it seems like the next step would be to develop my own materials that speak to me in my time, with things that they didn’t have access to then.

The second is that back in college, I had to take some sort of quantitative class. I took a math class that I was really fascinated by—modeling biological growth and form. It was taught by a mathematician at Kenyon named Judy Holdener, and Judy studied art before she switched to math. We ended up doing independent study together, and she taught me about the morpho butterfly, which is sort of a poster child for structural color. Having been a painter’s apprentice, I sort of fancied myself a young expert in color. But encountering this butterfly made me realize I had so much more to learn. Color can be generated in other ways than pigmentation. But to create structural color you had to operate on such a small scale. It seemed impossible. But as the years went on I started hearing feature stories about nanotechnology. And I realized these are the people who can create things that small. And that’s how I got the idea.

This article is about one of me favourite topics which is art/science and, happily, it’s a good read. (For anyone interested in her earlier work with colour and blue morpho butterflies, there’s this Feb. 12, 2010 posting.

Before heading off to the next topic, here’s one of Nichols’ images,

Visible Signs of Indeterminate Meaning 14, silver nanoparticle paint and silver mirroring on glass, 12 by 15.5 inches, 2015. These small works on glass are created with silver nanoparticles that Nichols synthesizes and with Victorian-era silver mirroring techniques. Visible Signs of Indeterminate Meaning is the product of carefully planned measurements, calculations, and titrations in a chemistry lab and of spontaneous smears, spills, and erasures in the artist’s painting studio. Credit: Donald Felton [downloaded from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/09/an_interview_with_kate_nichols_artist_in_residence_at_alivisatos_lab.html]

Nano definitions

Gary Machant’s Sept. 22, 2016 piece about nanomaterial definitions is well written but it’s for an audience who for one reason or another is interested in policy and regulation (Note: Links have been removed),

Consider two recent attempts. Exhibit A is the definition of nanotechnology adopted by the European Union. After much deliberation and struggle, in 2011 the European Commission, which aimed to adopt a “science-based” definition, came up with the following:

A natural, incidental or manufactured material containing particles, in an unbound state or as an aggregate or as an agglomerate and where, for 50% or more of the particles in the number size distribution, one or more external dimensions is in the size range 1 nm [nanometer] – 100 nm. In specific cases and where warranted by concerns for the environment, health, safety or competitiveness the number size distribution threshold of 50% may be replaced by a threshold between 1 and 50%.

Exhibit B is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed definition of nanomaterials. The regulatory body is scheduled to finalize rules this fall requiring companies that produce or handle nanomaterials to report certain information about such substances to the agency:

[A] chemical substance that is solid at 25 °C and atmospheric pressure that is manufactured or processed in a form where the primary particles, aggregates, or agglomerates are in the size range of 1–100 nm and exhibit unique and novel characteristics or properties because of their size. A reportable chemical substance does not include a chemical substance that only has trace amounts of primary particles, aggregates, or agglomerates in the size range of 1–100 nm, such that the chemical substance does not exhibit the unique and novel characteristics or properties because of particle size.

See the differences? The EPA definition only includes manufactured nanomaterials, but the EU definition includes manufactured, natural, and incidental ones. On the other hand, the EPA defines materials by size (1–100nm) and requires that they exhibit some novel property (like catalytic activity, chemical reactivity, or electric conductivity), while the EU just looks at size. And it goes on with differences in composition requirements, aggregate thresholds, and other characteristics.

These are just two of more than two dozen regulatory definitions of nanotechnology, all differing in important ways: size limits, dimensions (do we regulate in 1-D, 2-D, or 3-D?), properties, etc. These differences can have major practical significance—for example, some commercially important materials (e.g., graphite sheets) may be nanosize in one or two dimensions but not three. The conflicting definitions create confusion and inefficiencies for consumers, companies, and researchers when some substances are defined as nanomaterials under certain programs or nations but not others.

I recommend it if you want a good sense of the nanomaterial policy and regulatory environment.

Nano fatigue

This Sept. 27, 2016 piece by Dr. Andrew Maynard is written in a lightly humourous fashion by someone who’s been working in the nanotechnology field for decades. I have to confess to some embarrassment as I sometimes feel much the same way (“nano’d out”) and I haven’t been at it nearly as long (Note: Links have been removed),

Writing about nanotechnology used to be fun. Now? Not so much. I am, not to put too fine a point on it, nano’d out. And casual conversations with my colleagues suggest I’m not alone: Many of us who’ve been working in the field for more years than we care to remember have become fatigued by a seemingly never-ending cycle of nano-enthusiasm, analysis, critique, despondency, and yet more enthusiasm.

For me, this weariness is partly rooted in a frustration that we’re caught up in a mythology around nanotechnology that is not only disconnected from reality but is regurgitated with Sisyphean regularity. And yet, despite all my fatigue and frustration, I still think we need to talk nano. Just not in the ways we’ve done so in the past.

To explain this, let me go back in time a little. I was first introduced to the nanoscale world in the 1980s as an undergraduate studying physics in the United Kingdom. My entrée wasn’t Eric Drexler’s 1986 work Engines of Creation—which introduced the idea of atom-by-atom manufacturing to many people, and which I didn’t come across until some years later. Instead, for me, it was the then-maturing field of materials science.

This field drew on research in physics and chemistry that extended back to the early 1900s and the development of modern atomic theory. It used emerging science to better understand and predict how the atomic-scale structure of materials affected their physical and chemical behavior. In my classes, I learned about how microscopic features in materials influenced their macroscopic properties. (For example, “microcracks” influence glass’s macro properties like its propensity to shatter, and atomic dislocations affect the hardness of metals.) I also learned how, by creating well-defined nanostructures, we could start to make practical use of some of the more unusual properties of atoms and electrons.

A few years later, in 1989, I was studying environmental nanoparticles as part of my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. I was working with colleagues who were engineering nanoparticles to make more effective catalysts. (That is, materials that can help chemical reactions go faster or more efficiently—like the catalysts in vehicle tailpipes.) At the time virtually no one was talking about “nanotechnology.” Yet a lot of people were engaged in what would now be considered nanoscale science and engineering.

Fast forward to the end of the 1990s. Despite nearly a century of research into matter down at the level of individual atoms and molecules, funding agencies suddenly “discovered” nanotechnology. And in doing so, they fundamentally changed the narrative around nanoscale science and engineering. Nanoscale science and engineering (and the various disciplines that contributed to it) were rebranded as “nanotechnology”: a new frontier of discovery, the “next industrial revolution,” an engine of economic growth and job creation, a technology that could do everything from eliminate fossil fuels to cure cancer.

From the perspective of researchers looking for the next grant, nanotechnology became, in the words of one colleague, “a 14-letter fast-track to funding.” Almost overnight, it seemed, chemists, physicists, and materials scientists—even researchers in the biological sciences—became “nanotechnologists.” At least in public. Even these days, I talk to scientists who will privately admit that, to them, nanotechnology is simply a convenient label for what they’ve been doing for years.

The problem was, we were being buoyed along by what is essentially a brand—an idea designed to sell a research agenda.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Investment in nanotechnology has led to amazing discoveries and the creation of transformative new products. (Case in point: Pretty much every aspect of the digital world we all now depend on relies on nano-engineered devices.) It’s also energized new approaches to science engagement and education. And it’s transformed how we do interdisciplinary research.

But “brand nanotechnology” has also created its own problems. There’s been a constant push to demonstrate its newness, uniqueness, and value; to justify substantial public and private investment in it; and to convince consumers and others of its importance.

This has spilled over into a remarkably persistent drive to ensure nanotechnology’s safety, which is something that I’ve been deeply involved in for many years now. This makes sense, at least on the surface, as some products of nanotechnology have the potential to cause serious harm if not developed and used responsibly. For instance, it appears that carbon nanotubes can cause lung disease if inhaled, or seemingly benign nanoparticles may end up poisoning ecosystems. Yet as soon as you try to regulate “brand nanotechnology,” or study how toxic “brand nanotechnology” is in mice, or predict the environmental impacts of “brand nanotechnology,” things get weird. You can’t treat a brand as a physical thing.

Because of this obsession with “brand nanotechnology” (which of course is just referred to as “nanotechnology”), we seem to be caught up in an endless cycle of nanohype and nanodiscovery, where the promise of nanotech is always just over the horizon, and where the same nanonarrative is repeated with such regularity that it becomes almost myth-like.

I recommend reading the article in its entirety.

Risks

Korin Wheeler discusses nanomaterials and their possible impact on the environment in his Sept. 29, 2016 article. The introduction is a little leisurely but every word proves relevant to the topic (Note: Links have been removed),

Imagine your future self-driving car. You’ll get so much more work done with extra time in your commute, and without a driver, your commute will be safer. Or will it? During your first ride, you probably won’t be able to shake the fear that the software doesn’t know to avoid pedestrians or that you’ll get a ticket because the car ran a light. New technologies are inherently a tangle of exciting possibilities and new risks. We’ve learned from history—and from dinosaurs escaping Jurassic Park—that potential dangers must be evaluated and mitigated before new technologies are released.

Car crashes and T. rex teeth are obvious hazards, but the risks of nanotechnology can be less accessible. Their small size and surprising properties make them difficult to define, discuss, and evaluate. Yet these are the same properties that make nanotechnology so revolutionary and impactful. Nanotechnology is one of the core ideas behind the science of the driverless car and the science fiction of living, 21st-century dinosaurs. Your future self-driving vehicle will likely contain a catalytic converter made efficient by platinum nanomaterials and a self-cleaning paint made possible by titanium dioxide nanomaterials. If electric, the lithium-ion battery may contain nickel magnesium cobalt oxide, or NMC, nanomaterials. If nanotechnology fulfills its promises to reduce emissions, gas requirements, and water use, we will see quality of human life improve, and environmental impacts reduced. But like all progress, nanotechnologies have inherent risk.

…

In evaluating and reducing the environmental risks of nanotechnologies, scientists and engineers are taking a variety of approaches. Studies include two broad classifications of nanomaterials: natural and engineered. Natural nanomaterials have evolved with life on this planet. In our daily lives, they are found in ocean spray, campfire smoke, and even in milk as protein/lipid micelles. It is only in the past few decades, however, that scientists and engineers have been able to accurately make, manipulate, and characterize matter at the atomic scale. These “engineered” nanomaterials designed by scientists and engineers are made for specific applications in well-controlled, reproducible processes. Comparing a naturally occurring and an engineered nanomaterial is like comparing a pebble to a marble. Both are roughly the same size, but they are otherwise very different. Like most anything man-made, engineered nanomaterials are designed with a targeted function and their structure is more uniform, pure, pristine, and well-ordered. These two categories of material can behave and react differently.

Once the nanomaterial is released from manufacturer conditions, it can undergo dramatic changes, including physical, chemical, and biological transformations. As engineered nanomaterials enter the environment, they begin to resemble their natural counterparts. Let’s go back to the example of a marble. If you throw one into a stream, the marble may chip, develop imperfections, and change shape from pounding on rocks. Chemical reactions might strip it of its protective plastic coating. Microorganisms may even be able to take hold to form a new biological surface on the marble. By studying these kinds of complexities and imperfections already present in natural nanomaterials, scientists will be able to predict how these complexities change the behavior and impacts of engineered nanomaterials as well.

…

The diversity and novel properties of engineered nanomaterials affect the way they react and change in the environment. Every single engineered nanomaterial requires an environmental impact study designed to include a range of sizes, shapes, impurities, and surface properties. Since many nanomaterials are essentially small particles suspended in solution (known as “colloidal suspensions”), they can dissolve, join together (or “aggregate”), and undergo surface changes. We don’t have to consider these factors when it comes to more “traditional” molecular structures that are dissolved, like aspirin or table salt. Suddenly, an environmental impact study becomes an exponentially greater task

Read the article in its entirety to get a better sense of the complexity of the issues.

This September, Future Tense has been exploring nanotechnology as part of our ongoing project Futurography, which introduces readers to a new technological or scientific topic each month. Now’s your chance to show us how much you’ve learned.

With that [nanotechnology series] behind us, we’d like to hear about your thoughts. What do you think about these issues? Where should the field go from here? Is nanotechnology as such even a thing?

Come back next month [Oct. 2016] for a roundup of your responses. …

Enjoy!

ETA Oct. 11, 2016: Jacob Brogan has written up the results of the survey in an Oct. 7, 2016 piece for Slate. Briefly, the greatest interest is in medical applications and research into aging. People did not seem overly concerned about negative impacts although they didn’t dismiss the possibilities either. There’s more but for that you need to read Brogan’s piece.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) posted an Oct. (?), 2016 notice about a US National Nanotechnology Day,

ASME is excited to participate in National Nanotechnology Day an event sponsored by the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, which provides technical and administrative support to the Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee, serves as a central point of contact for Federal nanotechnology R&D activities, and provides public outreach on behalf of the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

This event will feature a series of community-led events and activities on or around October 9th to help to raise awareness of nanotechnology, how it is currently used in products that enrich our daily lives, and the challenges and opportunities it holds for the future. This date, 10/9, pays homage to the nanometer scale, 10-9 meters.

ASME has focused on Nanotechnology research and activities for many years. In 2001, the Nanotechnology Institute (NI) was formed to further the art, science and practice of nanotechnology by acting as a clearinghouse/focal point for ASME.

Over time, the Institute focused on devising interdisciplinary activities that bridge science, engineering, and applications. Such activities included the first-ever interdisciplinary track on Nanotechnology at ASME’s IMECE in 2001 and the one-day co-produced Nano Engineering and Investing Trends conference offered in June 2002, which served as a segue to the premier Integrated Nanosystems 2002 conference. In recent years, ASME’s strategic interest in Nano has been focused on Nano engineering for medicine and biology.

Today, we offer a host of articles, multimedia presentations, publications and courses on various aspects of nanotechnology: …

The NNCO has produced its own Oct. ?, 2016 notice about National Nanotechnology Day 2016 (I suspect their budget for promotion is constrained),

National Nanotechnology Day will feature a series of community-led events and activities on or around October 9th to help to raise awareness of nanotechnology, how it is currently used in products that enrich our daily lives, and the challenges and opportunities it holds for the future. This date, 10/9, pays homage to the nanometer scale, 10-9 meters.

Planning for various events, activities, papers, and articles is underway at organizations around the country, and the list is growing! In addition, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office is promoting two activities:

Nanoscience and engineering explore methods of manipulating materials on the molecular scale, to create very, very small structures and devices-from stain-repellent clothing to new medicines to treat diseases. Advances in nanotechnology are likely to change the way we design and fabricate almost everything.

Zoom into Nano presents a variety of large-scale, immersive experiences in the world of nanotechnology. Zoom into tiny structures and devices to see the amazing beauty of natural and manmade objects at very high magnification. Immerse yourself in models of atoms and molecules that are enlarged to 100 million times their actual size.

“We are pleased to be bringing the world of nanotechnology to our visitors,” said Scott Sampson, President and CEO of Science World. “As the demand for this kind of technology increases, we feel that it’s important for British Columbians to understand its relevancy and significance. We also feel it’s important for our young future science leaders to see this technology as a potential path for career opportunities.”

Zoom into Nano was developed by the Sciencenter of Ithaca, NY, through a partnership with Cornell University, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

You can purchase tickets in advance of your visit by visiting the Zoom into Nano exhibit page. You’ll also find a Nano blog on the page although there doesn’t appear to be a link to it yet.

Spin wheels and zoom into the nanoscale! Move your body—dissolve a crystal and stretch a molecule! Create a pattern, then shrink it! Challenge yourself—can you transport atoms in motion? Build molecular models and giant carbon nanotubes. Use your senses: discover how you can detect invisible molecules with just your nose. Find out how nanotechnology affects our lives.

Zoom Into Nano is a hands-on interactive exhibition focusing on how scientists see and make things that are too small to see. Nanoscale science and engineering are methods of manipulating materials on the molecular scale to generate very, very small structures and devices.

The brochure includes information about individual parts of the exhibition such as the: Magnification Station, Infinity Crystal, Carbon Nanotubes, Particle Progression, Shrink a Pattern, Listen to a Nano Story, and more.

The show at Vancouver’s Science World runs from Sept. 24, 2016 – Jan.2, 2017 and there’s a 20% discount coupon for a general admission (up to five people per coupon), which is valid until Oct. 31, 2016. You can find the coupon in The Georgia Straight newspaper, Sept. 22 – 29, 2016 edition on p. 4.

One final note: Science World Telus World of Science is a peculiar name borne of some odd circumstances. Telus, a telecommunications company, gave the former Science World a great sum of money on the agreement that they could stick their corporate name onto the facility’s name (brand), Science World. There was a major public outcry and so a compromise position was achieved. Most locals still call it Science World and the facility is mostly called that in the media but the official name includes Telus World of Science until such time as the funding runs out at which point a new corporate donor could require a new compromise.

A chimera is an animal/human hybrid (shades of the Island of Dr. Moreau) and the US government conducted a public consultation on the topic according to an Aug. 11, 2016 article by Dr. Andrew Maynard for slate.com (Note: Links have been removed),

On Aug. 4 [2016], the NIH proposed two changes to the way the agency will oversee research using human stem cells in nonhuman primates. Policy changes like these are required to go out for public review and comment before being implemented, so we’re now entering a 30-day public comment period—everyone with opinions on research into combining humans with other animals has a chance to have his or her say.

That sounds inclusive and democratic, but usually only advocacy groups, concerned organizations, and policy wonks get involved. This isn’t surprising: The call for comments is posted in the rather esoteric Federal Register, a great publication for curing insomnia but not everyday reading for most people. Furthermore, issues like this are usually complex and require at least some background knowledge to understand.

But mashing up humans with pigs, sheep, and other animals is probably the sort of thing that ordinary citizens will want to have a say in. The challenge is, how do you help draw society’s ethical lines if you’ve only got 30 days to comment, and the issue is not straightforward?

The science at stake here involves “chimeras”—animals that are engineered to include both human and nonhuman cells and organs. This technology is increasingly possible with advances in stem cell research and gene editing. And it’s got a lot of scientists excited. Chimeras create brand-new research possibilities that might help us prevent devastating illnesses or understand the health impacts of chemical exposures. They also open the door to the possibility of growing replacement human organs in animals. Think about the possibilities of getting a new heart or lungs without someone having to die first.

Yet not everyone’s excited by the prospect of animals becoming partially “human.” Chimeras raise complex moral and ethical questions around creating part-human animals, questions that have less to do with the “could we?” of science and more to do with the broader “should we?”

Things become especially gnarly when faced with the possibility of chimeras developing part-human brains. Margaret Atwood explored this to great effect in in her MaddAddam trilogy, in which pigs designed to grow human organs (pigoons) developed humanlike intelligence. Atwood’s imagined future is speculative, but the science is catching up fast. And as it does, it may become harder to draw the line between humans and humanlike animals.

Scientists are already close to creating chimeras. Look at this description from my Aug. 11, 2016 posting on osteosarcomas,

… Researchers usually inject human or other tumor cells into their [mouse] bodies to mimic human cancers, Fan said. They also are bred to have compromised immune systems, to prevent them from rejecting the tumors.

Specifically there were two public consultations (from Andrew’s article; Note: A link has been removed),

… the agency has now put forward two proposals for public comment. One is an amendment to the 2009 guidelines that would extend slightly what researchers cannot do with nonhuman primates and breeding animals. The other proposal—and the more relevant of the two here—would establish an internal committee that reviews proposals for using human stem cells in nonhuman animals.

Here, NIH [US National Institutes of Health] is proposing to set up an internal committee that would decide which chimera research proposals get funded and which do not. According to the agency’s announcement, it’s looking for public input on the scope of the committee—essentially what types of research proposals would end up in front of it and how it would subsequently decide what is ethical and responsible (and therefore fundable) and what is not.

Initially, the plan is for the committee to focus on general research using human stem cells in nonhuman vertebrates (excluding primates) and on research where human cells may end up affecting an animal’s brain function. This second point gets to the core of concerns that somehow, by introducing human stem cells, hybrid animals could develop humanlike brain functions, possibly resulting in greater intelligence or more humanlike behavior. The problem is, once introduced to the embryo, it’s not always possible to tell where human stem cells will end up and what they’ll do.

This committee will be made up of NIH staff, presumably including experts in socially responsible research and innovation, as well as stem cell researchers and bioethicists. But beyond the 30-day comment period, it’s unclear how they’ll engage (or even whether they’ll engage) with ordinary people. Yet for ethical and responsible chimera research, ongoing public participation in the review process is essential. There are too many “should we?” questions that must not be left solely to scientists: What are the ethical boundaries around creating human-nonhuman chimera, for instance? Or how do we decide what are acceptable or unacceptable outcomes?

For this public participation to be meaningful, scientists and others need to do a better job explaining chimera research, what they are planning to do (and why), and what the benefits and consequences might be.

Andrew’s piece is primarily focused on the public consultation aspect of this research but it also offers an interesting and nuanced approach to some of the questions and issues raised by the research.

That was a bit unusual since the Americans make a point of being clear in their public consultation requests. Regardless, I hope Canadians follow suit at some point.

Finally, there was one comment to Andrew’s article which I feel deserves to be seen by as many people as possible,

don’t I have enough to worry about as the father os [sic] a two year old girl without you people raising the possibility that she might someday bring home a centaur to meet the family …

Vancouver’s (Canada) Café Scientifique is definitely roaming around. This time Yagger’s Downtown (433 W. Pender) is hosting the upcoming July 2016 Café Scientifique talk. From the July 18, 2016 notice received via email,

Our next café will happen on Tuesday July 26th [2016], 7:30pm in the back room at Yagger’s Downtown (433 W Pender). Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Jaymie Matthews, a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. The title of his talk is:

GOLDILOCKS AND THE 3000+ WORLDS:
Searching for planets that are “just right”

A little more than two decades ago, we knew of only a handful of planets, those in our own Solar System. As of 14 July 2016, there are about 3400 confirmed exoplanets and thousands more strong candidates. We live in a revolutionary era for the understanding of the origin and evolution of planets, including our own Earth.

The statistical evidence is mounting that planets are commonplace in the Galaxy. What about life on those planets? Life on this planet depends on building blocks of complex carbon molecules and the transport medium of liquid water. Carbon and water molecules are found in interstellar clouds. What about liquid water oceans on alien worlds?

The first step in finding possible abodes for life is to find planets in the Habitable Zones of their stars, whose surface temperatures would allow liquid water. “Goldilocks worlds” – not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life as we know it.

I’ll give you an update on our census of exoplanets, and the surprises so far. How many of these are Goldilocks worlds, and what will be the next steps to see if they indeed have oceans and life?

Although there’s one Goldilocks world in our own Solar System, Earth, many are excited by the prospect of microbial life on Mars. I’ll tell you why I’d bet on life being found first not on the dusty surface of the planet Mars, but beneath the icy surface of one of the moons of Jupiter, Europa. Goldilocks worlds must make room for Deep Habitats in our search for extraterrestrial life.

Here’s a bit more information about Dr. Jaymie Matthews (from the biography attached to the July 18, 2016 Café Scientifique notice),

Jaymie Matthews is an astrophysical “gossip columnist” who unveils the hidden lifestyles of stars. Professor Matthews is also an “astro-paparazzo” who spies on planets around other stars that might be homes for alien celebrities. Maybe not Vulcans, but the discovery of microbes on another world would make them newsmakers of the century.

Matthews is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia [UBC]. He leads the MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission – Canada’s first space telescope – and is an expert in the fields of stellar seismology (using the vibrations of vibrating stars to probe their hidden interiors and histories) and exoplanets. He received his B.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Western Ontario.

In 2006, Prof. Matthews was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2012, he received a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Prof. Matthews is a member of the Executive Council for NASA’s Kepler mission hunting for Earth-sized exoplanets in the Habitable Zones of their stars. He’s on the Science Team for BRITE Constellation (BRIght Target Explorer) – a Canadian–Austrian–Polish satellite mission to monitor the brightest stars in the night sky. Matthews was elected Vice-President of IAU (International Astronomical Union) Commission G4 on Pulsating Stars in 2015. He is an Associate Editor of the astronomy journal Frontiers, and has co-authored more than 200 refereed scientific papers.

Matthews served on the Boards of Directors of Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre and Youth Science Canada, receiving the Canada-Wide Science Fair Alumni Award in 2015. He holds a 1999 Killam Prize for teaching excellence in the UBC Faculty of Science, and the 2002 Teaching Prize of the Canadian Association of Physicists. Matthews is a co-founder of and instructor for UBC’s Science 101 course for disadvantaged residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He was a “Human Library Book” in Surrey, BC where “readers” could reserve him to ask about science or life, and a storyteller at the Kootenay Storytelling Festival in Nelson, BC. Matthews was featured in the Discovery Channel series “Light: More Than Meets The Eye”, and the documentary “LUNARCY!” He’s a producer and writer for Knowledge (BC’s educational TV network) of Space Suite – a series of astronomy/space ‘music videos’. Matthews was awarded the Canadian Astronomical Society’s Qilak Award for education and outreach in 2016. Qilak is an Inuit word for the “canopy of the heavens” or the sky overhead.